


I ought to be thy Adam

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Choking, Episode: s06e08 Let's Kill Hitler, F/M, Graphic Description, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-16
Updated: 2013-08-16
Packaged: 2017-12-23 17:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/929065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She swallows lies. Twisted Galatea, she takes lessons from Frankenstein.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I ought to be thy Adam

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

He cannot believe she actually follows when he crawls out from the under the bed.

She grew strong and nasty in fear of the monster under her bed.

 

Her mum told her of him and his shape in the darkness and it was a mask of glory and dreams and kindness.

The hours and silence whispered her other tales, of girls taken away and wiped clean, of rust and froth. And she knows it is not her imagination; she could not invent such phantasms.

 

All little girls admire him. Wicked, but not deadly. Little girls don’t kill him.

 

He would never dare to imagine she used to tear apart spiders.

He probably eats them. While his minions are shaking in fear. To keep them safe and unscarred, he makes a mockery of the monsters.

He wants to show them monsters can be defeated. And grimaces nearly cover the sharp of his teeth and flailing limbs distract from the claws of his hands.

“I eat spiders. Spiders are good.”

An empire for breakfast.

 

At midnight, he would heave the content of his stomach.

Anything to make them believe he had defeated, rather than coolly murdered the monsters.

It remains, plain and treble, a cry for help, to all of the spared monsters in the Universe:

_Come and eat me, please._

 

“Dinner?”

His eyes like beetles, monster of jest and gavel, he offers.

He still thinks he is the monster. And she the girl to be saved.

One detail escaped him, from his haunt of broken toys and yellowing socks. The world was upside down; her bed was of rotten leaves masquerading as books, and the pebbles were digging her back.

She grew up on his grave.

 

“I’m all yours, Honey.”

Lips wide and nocuous like an _arum dracunculus_. He bites.

On her mouth, light, he tastes something different.

Definitely not spiders.

She tortured spiders by serendipity and for findings.

And when he kisses her for the first time he cannot be quite sure she is not going to tear him apart.

Eventually she does.

 

Fell for a candy, the little devil. It was pink and plum and to be honest she did not take him for one enjoying such treat.

Funny.

She did not expect him to be prepared for her.

Perhaps her fears and hopes did find a way, after all, to his kingdom under the bed, carried down by a vessel blue as night.

 

He’s dying and she is magnificent.

Clay creature, never have his sins shaped such wondrous delirium. Rooted in the charnel-drenched path he drew, it’s a flower of pure evil -as he is impure. He can work with purity; just another form of rawness. Cutting her, increasing tenfold the number of facets, to give her the appearance of a hero.

He laid the foundations of his salvation. In a glance, in a touch, in a name.

“And tell her something for me…”

 

In death, her monster has the colours of dreams and kings passed away, and a name on the lips. She knows it is not his phantasms.

A woman from his story before the story was made.

A promise or a lie with the semblance of peace. Something worth saving.

She spills herself in him.

Ragged doll, he lies witless and she breathes life into him. Her creation; the man who owes her his death.

Her tools are newly forged and matter-cutting.

He burns her skin, scorches her nerve endings and leaves her dry. Life pours into him, as molasses of penultimate embed between her cells.

She collapses in dreams white, held together by the knowledge he follows her into the brief end.

And he is right there when she wakes up. Above her bed. In broad daylight.

 

“Don’t follow me.” He means: _Don’t love me._

He should go. Now. And not come back before long. Before she is much, much older.

Before she is what she ought to be, not his. Her unearthing, her sharpening must be carefully run. And alone.

_You’ll grow up to be someone amazing. You don’t need any monster down here to keep you company in the night._

But he is the one not to leave her.

Her lips are far too easy to find.

 

Berlin passes and he stays with his eyes hungry and his hands knitting. He trips on her skin and impacts wherever he can. She revels in the intimacy, almost shocked to taste him aroused when she shows wanton cruelty to one of the nurses.

She escapes and accidentally turns to shred a group of tourists on Barcelona. He scolds her, rough, but the assurance of his punishment on her skin that night feels like abiding.

 

Nuclear physics instead of archaeology.

Shame crawls on him, he hides in her room. But by dusk, when she joins him, dinner on a plate and thighs raw over his lap, her poisoning fingers have the numbing efficiency of drugs.

He stays a little longer. She will study old bones and crumpling religions later. Later.

Time is not the boss of him.

 

She starves his confidence, feeds his boredom. He grows lush with want for her and the everyday lust has driven him reckless. Touches after touches, his nails dig deeper; she teaches him the ways of war.

He follows her when she steps on the Sontaran ground, two guns in hands.

 

Obviously. She likes him. Bites a little too much. He has the misfortune to enjoy it.

And she takes advantage of it.

 

She loses control, a white hot blade just passes before her eyes and blinds her. She grasps at thin air, aiming for agency, finding nothing but desire and adrenaline. Around, are white fury and chaffing edges. She skids, throws her arms, forgetting there are knives at the end.

Eventually crashes into his rubble-frame, shaking and sobbing faces she forgot.

They collapse empires for release. For distraction. For pleasure.

Just the vile ones, of course.

It is about the drums and shackles of bones they ring as bugles. Claiming the cries of war as theirs and breeding them like cluttering fetishes. Their ship fades to purple and they ignore the crust of gore, rasping her skin and warpainting his nails, as they consume each other.

 

She loves him. Each time she tells him, she is asking if she is going to become that woman, that someone amazing.

He should answer: “Not Yet. I must go.”

But her lips baulk him denial.

He shakes. This is insane, life-burning, sanity-eating. Each time the dreaded “I love you” escapes his lips, between sobs and pants, he knows he lost ground on her.

Loved too soon, and too ferociously.

And the little girl killing spiders rejoices. She gulps down the words like candies. The someone amazing straggles; the lies lured her and soon she is lost.

 

Her Ulysses, liar and hero of war, ruthless and jealous.

The tales were right after all.

 

He never strayed from Philoctetes and now the Trojan war never happened.

 

The thrill of moulding him to her semblance wanes. There is a lost sense to their running and killing. Something does not sit right. He is just what she expected him to be. Somehow, she is not anymore.

She has a nagging suspicion he killed her long before she killed him.

 

When he realises he loves her quite completely, quartering spiders and people, he acknowledges his defeat. Time has been rewritten and the woman he promised she would become never came to the world.

 

She loves him genocides and spiders eating. She ends up choking him in the middle of their games anyway.

Lucky and delicious he can regenerate.

 

With lucidity still, he realises he sweeps down on an entire race because she was disappointed in the number of bloodied shields and weapons in their museum. Too little of them.

“But how come?”

“Usually they do the winning. Or don’t fight.”

“Well, that’s not fair. Couldn’t we… At least one squadron. Just so that the wall has a little more colours.”

_Too late._

Blood and mud on her skin are the only garment he allows her these days.

 

She feeds on destruction. He must have cannibalised her at some point.

Where is she? This woman trusted and loved he lavished on her as incentive, that day in Berlin, long ago.

Where are her parents? He said he released them after an encounter with a monster.

She doubts more and more. Has the impudence to wait, as before, for her, this woman of songs.

 

He tastes burnt flesh on her lips each time she kisses him to his next regeneration. Each time a little more. Black lips. Her resistance to the bio energy grows weaker. Time has been unwoven from her cells.

He wonders if she will burn entirely before time catches up with her and she gets completely erased.

 

She understands too late what he did, that day in Berlin, when he offered to come back to her at the Sisters. Changed her future. Altered his past.

She hates him, nearly, somehow manages to extract from the core of self-disgust and fury a crumb of tenderness for what he gifted -built- to her.

A monster to walk by her side.

 

She flickers, now.

Her mouth is sealed and her body fading, so slowly he suspects the Universe might try to give him a lesson. For loving her before her time.

Her hands fly to his mouth to silence the threats and cries he spits. Her feeble state has defeated her words of anger. Washed her anew with weariness and compassion.

She fears his hearts alone.

 

There is just enough flesh, just enough matter still in her for him to embrace. He cannot leave traces anymore.

Rather he knows he will not find them on her skin by the morning.

And just like the first days, when he held his never to be bride, still not rampaging, still settling for devouring each other, he made love to her, as what she could never be anymore and what she was never granted by his lust.

River Song.

 

And when he kisses her dead, his lips part on a paradox salvaged; nothingness.

 

The TARDIS bears her in a stone sarcophagus. To encase a never-was, one needs the thickest of tombs.

 

He does not stay and wrap his last body in grief, in clouds. The Universe showed him no mercy, taking the one he shaped to chaos.

He takes a name he read on her lids when she refused to close then for a last time.

_The Valeyard._


End file.
